Cloud Platform Spending Signals Major Shift in IT

November 26, 2012

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Analysis firm Gartner predicts that platform-as-a-service (PaaS) spending will hit about $1.5 billion in the next year, according to a recent ZDNet article. The spending could hit as high as $2.9bn by 2016, according to recent Gartner research. While these numbers are still relatively small when compared to the mega-billions spent in IT – this growth is representative in my mind of a serious shift in how businesses build and deploy software applications.

We are seeing less and less of the on-site, monolithic development model. This model requires not only immense on site (and expensive) IT resources, but also a sophisticated skill set. Internal app developers in this model need to master programming languages AND the ability to deploy these applications in such a way that employees and customers can access them via any device, at any time using the web. Simply put, apps teams need to be both developers and operations specialists when building apps in the traditional sense, only to be deployed over modern channels.

Today, there is definitely a case where developers and other IT staff are playing hybrid roles (often called “devops” – contracting this development/operations mesh). However, by using a cloud platform like Caspio, much of the needlessly complex facets of both development and operations are stripped away. All IT managers using Caspio need to do is configure their apps (not code them), and in a few clicks deploy them to the web and make them available as mobile apps.

We are on the verge of a major shift, one where utility and ease-of-operations trumps the giant, unwieldy internal IT stack of the past. Caspio has long believed in the benefits of making it easier for developers and businesses to build, deploy and manage apps, even before “PaaS” and “cloud” were hot IT buzzwords. But as more businesses look to the cloud, we hope to help more and more businesses make it easier than ever to visualize, build, and deploy all kinds of apps for all kinds of purposes.